The Ohio was still rising, the current waxing stronger and more rapid each day. Thus far the ark had tied up only by night, but her young captain had a particular reason for stopping at this point.
During his previous visits to New Orleans Marion had met many odd characters along the levees, among others a certain French doctor and savant, named Buchat, who was vastly interested in the natural history of the New World, and after an odd fashion of his own was incessantly questioning the hunters and boatmen who came down the great river. The latter generally considered him crack-brained; but Marion understood him better, and liked the vivacious old gentleman.
Dr. Buchat had heard of the huge skeletons of mastodons (then called mammoths) which had been found by the settlers in the Ohio Valley, and was very curious concerning the localities where they were discovered. Marion Royce, who had once ascended Big Bone Creek for game, gave the old Frenchman such information as he was able concerning the size of the thighbones, vertebræ and skulls which he had seen in the basin of the Lick.
Marion’s account so fired the enthusiasm of the collector that he offered the young man a thousand francs if he would unearth a skeleton of one of these huge creatures and fetch it down the river on his next trip.
A thousand francs—about two hundred dollars—was a sum not to be despised in those days of small means, especially by a young pioneer who was contemplating a home of his own in the near future. Marion had determined to win this, if it could be done without jeopardy to the ark and cargo.
Big Bone Creek is but a very small affluent of the Ohio, little more than a brook, in fact. It enters from the Kentucky shore through a fringe of willows, between low, sugar-loaf hills, then densely wooded by lofty sycamore and walnut. At low water boats could ascend this creek; but now the rising current set back into the mouth of it for a distance of fully two miles.
Wood-wise and wary, the young ark’s captain tied up to the Kentucky shore, two miles above the creek mouth, and sent Kenton round about through the woods to reconnoiter the lick. For, as it was a place frequented by deer and elk, it had come also to be a place of ambush for the stealthy redskins.
Kenton came upon the ashes of a campfire, two or three days old, on one of the hills overlooking the lick, and concluded that Indians had recently been watching there. The presence of a large herd of deer about the springs, however, convinced him that they had gone away.
Very early the next morning, therefore, the ark dropped down to the creek mouth and was poled up through the slack water for a distance of nearly two miles. But to guard against surprise, it was moored out in the stream, instead of being tied to the bank, by driving down three setting-poles, so as to give forty feet of open water all around it.
Shadwell Lincoln, with seven of the crew, including young Moses Ayer and Lewis Hoyt, was left in charge. Marion himself, with the others, set off for the lick, provided with axes and a shovel. From where the ark lay they had not far from two miles to go, through the forest and over hills.